Haiku Corner

You are very nice, But this bug you logged shows that You're not very bright.

Welcome

I'm a founding member of Thinking Ink Press. I'm a ten-year attendee of Write to the End, a creative writing group in San Jose, CA led by author and artist Keiko O'Leary. I test software at a well known file sync company. I write stories; they aren't published, you can't see them. I write sci-fi and fantasy -- I spill science and history into my fantasy, and fantasy into my sci-fi. I meditate and study Jungian psychology, ancient myths, and spirituality in my free time.

I <3 Star Trek and The Wheel of Time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Northern Exposure. (I'm a child of the 90s.) I wish Voyager spent longer on obstacles instead of resolving them within an episode. I think fairies are wicked, and Santa Claus is the secret love child of a Fairy Godmother and a Father Frost. I wonder what the world would be like if apartment buildings had hot-swappable rooms like VMWare hosts have CPU and RAM.

I blog sometimes. Sometimes I stop, because I have too many disconnected things to talk about, and you probably only care about some of them. Roman history is fascinating, as is Tudor England, and, just by the way, lords were often women in medieval France, far oftener than history books claim.

I majored in Computer Science and History, because they're so closely related; I knit; I love fermenting food; cats are better than dogs; and it turns out that editing books is a lot like testing software, and I'm good at both.

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Categories

Productive Food!

So far this summer, we’ve frozen corn, peaches, apricots, pluots, pesto, more corn and more peaches, blueberries, blackberries, and, uh, some random bottles of water that we put into coolers.

Yesterday we made:

our last batch of pesto for the season using fresh basil and fresh lemon from our neighbors’ parents’ yard,

hot sauce,

a huge container of salsa with tomatoes from our neighbors (which doesn’t freeze well, so we’re going to be eating a lot of salsa this week),

lemon juice from our neighbors’ parents’ lemons (the frozen lemon juice is in the kitchen freezer, so you can’t see it here)

cleaning fluid out of lemon rinds, basil stems, and some rosemary sprigs soaking in vinegar,

apple sauce from two sad apples that fell off the tree,

which went on our pancakes,

and beet/carrot/ginger/pear/red bell pepper/parsley juice.

I feel quite proud of us. (No wonder I spent all afternoon tired on the couch.)

There’s still hot peppers and tomatoes to acquire and process this month, and then starting in late september will be apple season (we have 3 producing apple trees). I’m trying to figure out better (i.e. more nutritional) things to do with the apples than just making apple juice, but everything I come up with takes a lot of peeling and slicing. We had boxes and boxes and boxes of apples last year, I’m not sure I can handle slicing and slicing and slicing and peeling and peeling. But I was thinking of trying an apple slicer. Anyone have opinions about apple slicers?

Like this:

2 thoughts on “Productive Food!”

My sister has an apple-peeler. You put one apple into it, then turn it with a handle. It’s like the apple is turning on a spit. The peeler trims off the peel in a spiral pattern from top to bottom. That saves her a lot of time when she makes apple pie.

Ben reminded me that we have one of those! Ours is slow, though, because it only peels a teeny strip. I came across this peeler/corer/slicer on amazon that’s heavy-duty and seems like it would do the job, but I decided not to buy it because commenters complained it doesn’t handle awkwardly shaped potatoes, and we sometimes get awkwardly shaped apples from our tree. :-/ Instead I went for a hand-held apple corer/slicer that lets you select 8 or 16 slices. I don’t know how well the mechanism will hold up, though.

And then I came across a suggestion of making apple peel tea out of the apple peels! Or freezing them and adding them to smoothies. My goal is to get more use out of the whole apple, because much as I love our apple juice, it’s just not as nutritious as a whole apple would be.